Any celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. — of his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, his ion for racial justice, equity, and nonviolence — should be careful to engage with him in whole, not just the pieces that feel convenient.
What often happens in a lot of expressions of remembrance is an attempt to soften and sanitize the radical work and point of view that made King unpopular during his life, and also in his death. That would be a mistake, scholars say.
“I think, if we can keep in mind his more radical statements and how King, on his birthday, might trouble us to look at our current conditions and propel us to action. We that he was not always welcomed,” said Lerone A. Martin, the Martin Luther King Jr. centennial professor and the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. “If we can that, it might lead us to a better understanding of Martin Luther King Jr. was and his legacy, than if recognize him as someone who has always been celebrated because he has not always been celebrated, at one point in time he was vilified. I think if we that it can lead us to read his work differently and to engage him in conversation in a different way.”
Martin, whose research focuses on the intersection of religion and politics in the United States in the 20th century, is ed in conversation by Christopher Carter, an associate professor of theology at the University of San Diego who studies race and culture, ecology, and theology. Martin and Carter took some to discuss how they’re thinking about King and his legacy this year, what happens when we don’t engage with him as a full person, and how they’d hope to see people celebrate his life and work today. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: As we approach the observation of King’s birthday, and celebrate the civil rights leader’s life and work, how are you thinking about this day this year?
Carter: For me, the end of the year has been particularly difficult for us as a global community, with respect to the conflict that’s happening in Israel and Gaza, and in the ways in which it’s highlighting tensions that are in place between communities who are oppressed and have experienced oppression, and communities who have historically oppressed others. That’s what I’m thinking about in of King because I believe, fundamentally, in the use of nonviolence, not only for our individual lives, but also for nation states, for statecraft. I fully believe we actually can have nation states working together in ways that embody the principles of nonviolence that lead us toward what King would call the “beloved community.” What I see happening in Israel and in Gaza right now is a denial of the humanity of everyone. Everyone there is suffering from this particular kind of dehumanization from the outside. They have either historically suffered from it, or are currently suffering from this particular kind of dehumanization that doesn’t see them as beloved children of God. Again, King would call them beloved children of God, made in the image of God, so that’s weighing on my heart right now. The primary thing that I would go to is his speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” which, I believe, is his most underappreciated speech that also offers a path forward for us right now. This speech was his acknowledgement that he was speaking against the Vietnam War. This was a really, really huge deal because him giving this speech put him against the Black community, in some sense, because they’re like, ‘Hey, you talking about Vietnam is distracting from the work we’re trying to do with anti-racism.’ Then, you have his White ers who are like, ‘You are not an expert in this area, you need to stick to your own area of expertise,’ and it alienated many people because it’s seen as unpatriotic to critique the war at that time. He begins by saying, basically, that it’s a call to conscience. That he has come to a point where he can’t not say something. People forget how hard it was for him at the end, when he began to make connections between anti-Black racism, materialism, and militarism. He talks about these three things and how these three things are interconnected. He sees the way these things are woven together to harm his community. The beautiful thing about King is that he understood how this impacted all people, not just Black people. He was always able to craft a vision and talk about how this impacted people overseas, how this impacted the Vietnamese, how it impacted the French, how it impacted White people in the South, how it impacted White people in general, and how it impacted Black people and other people of color. He was able to talk about how these wars, this conflict, and the ways in which we worship those three pillars of militarism, materialism, [and racism].
In the very beginning of the speech, he says, “A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” I really felt like he came to the point where he felt like, if he was not being honest about his own particular feelings about what was happening in Vietnam, that he was betraying his call as a clergyperson and his call as a minister. It’s hard when the world puts us in the position where we need to talk about injustice in ways that are going to make people uncomfortable. The difficult thing that King did so brilliantly is he was able to pull people in in a way that allowed them sit in their discomfort, but also feel as though he can hold that space for them in that discomfort. He could pull people of color, he could pull White people to that space and say, ‘We’re going to sit here because we know we need to feel this in order to work through it.’ He had done it so successfully with issues of race, and to an extent he was doing it with issues of class, but when it came to Vietnam, that was something that was particularly challenging for folks.
Martin: I am thinking about how do we promote some of the understudied and unrealized aspects of his legacy. In particular, I’m thinking about how do we promote what King called the “amelioration of the triple evils,” that is racism, poverty, and war. I’m thinking about that, that we’re not just celebrating him as someone who fought against racism, although he did; but how do we move on to make sure we understand his legacy as it relates to the interconnectedness of racism, poverty, and war? That’s what I’m thinking about during this holiday.
Q: The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change— the nonprofit founded by his wife, Coretta Scott King, serving as a resource for education, research, and activism — notes that their theme for this year is “Shifting the Cultural Climate through the Study and Practice of Kingian Nonviolence.” How do you see King’s method of nonviolence working today, particularly considering the legislative blows to reproductive rights, disempowering voters, continued economic disparities, and denying rights to LGBTQ folks?
Carter: I think it causes us to expand our definition of violence. Right now, we tend to think that there’s nothing that we’ve created that necessarily impedes people from having access to goods and services like health care or abortions or reproductive justice, in most states. I think, what he would argue is that, rather than this negative approach of ‘We’re not doing anything to impede it,’ the nonviolent approach is a more positive way of framing. That we ought to provide. What ought we give? What ought we do? How might we actually empower folks to live their best lives and to equip them with what they need to live life to the fullest and their most abundant? The denial of those things that we can do, is, in this sense, a type of violence. For him, this is how I think he ultimately got to militarism and consumerism because he felt like we were spending so much money on these wars, to the extent that it was money that could be used to help poor communities, especially, be able to thrive. Beyond that, you can see this is the same thing that’s happening if you look at the budget that we’re going to , and you look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that are going to defense. You could take, I don’t know, a couple billion and actually feed people and improve our public schools. Just take 10 percent. Ten percent less focus on expanding the American empire around the world and ask, ‘What does it mean to tend to those who are most vulnerable and in need?’ We often blame poor people for being poor, or people who are suffering for their suffering, rather than seeing it as a more structural issue where we have created systems that have not only allowed this to happen, but don’t have ways that people can get out of their poverty (because you are often born into it).
Martin: I certainly think that his method of nonviolence is still enduring and I would argue has not been applied as widely as King, I think, would like to see today, especially as we think about our foreign policy and how we think about what’s happening in our own country as relates to police brutality. So, I think that’s part of what it means to celebrate MLK Day, is to always keep in mind his concerns about violence and not just what violence does to individuals, what it does to individual fleshly bodies, but also what it does to individual souls and the soul of this nation.
Q: During this time of year, we often see people aligned with conservative politics quoting Dr. King in ways that are divorced from the context of his message against racism, poverty, and war. What happens when we attempt to paint him and his work as being “post-racial,” as a soft and quiet form of gentle resistance to injustice?
Carter: I would say it’s denying us the understanding and expression of his full humanity. It’s like he’s rendered as the invisible man. We only want to see parts of King, not the entirety of who he is. If I was related to him, what would frustrate me is that people are only willing to lean into the parts of King that gives them comfort, or that they can take his messaging in a way that allows them to feel as though they’re on the right side of history. Then, that working to understanding that, yes, King has flaws, but King also changed and grew and evolved over time. So, there doesn’t appear to be this attempt to understand the nature of the work he was doing and how his message continued to grow and evolve and shift. That’s the part that frustrates me because when you have conservatives who will take the age in “I Have a Dream” and they talk about people being judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, they don’t look at the whole thing where he’s talking about reparations within that speech. He’s talking about Black people being compensated for labor that had gone uncompensated. At the end of his life, there is a clip on YouTube where he’s talking about preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign, and he’s talking about all the ways in which our American government was set up to enable and provide for White, European immigrants to come here and have access to land through the Homestead Act; to have access to loans that Black people couldn’t get; to schooling through the GI Bill that Black people couldn’t get; to all of these kinds of ways that helped them get a foothold, and these things were denied to Black people. He’s like, ‘How do you tell someone to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and they don’t even have boots?’ He ends it by saying, ‘And we’re coming to Washington and we’re coming to get our check.’ You listen to it and he was like, this is an issue of economic justice. This ain’t about Black people being lazy; we have not been compensated. What frustrates me is that people don’t talk about the totality of who he is, that part of his message, which I think is the part of his message that ultimately led him to be assassinated.
Again, one of the beautiful things about King is that he was able to put us in that space of discomfort and hold us there. We can have this conversation, which is ultimately about reparations, and people be uncomfortable, but come and hear what he has to say. If you imagine people trying to do that now, it’s so difficult because a lot of people in our culture, regardless of their racialization, desire to be in a space where they feel soothed. They don’t have the resilience to turn inward and say, ‘How can I work through this discomfort">his speech at the end of the march from Selma, in that speech he talks about how he understands how poor White people have been manipulated by the government to vote against their best interests. He’s like, ‘When y’all were hungry and y’all didn’t have any money, or any food to put in your bellies, they sent you Jim Crow and told you that Jim Crow was enough to keep you full.’ Put him in context, actually point people to educate them, but they don’t want to educate them. They want to make themselves feel like they’re on the right side of history with respect to race because the worst thing for them is to be seen as someone who’s racist or traffics in racialization, or does anything that is racially biased. That is the worst thing for them, so they want to make sure that they are seen in a way that they’re not trafficking in that, even though their practices and the impact of what they do actually harms and continues to harm or marginalize people of color by what they do, the policies they promote, the things that they write, things of that nature.
Martin: I’m really glad you asked me that question. It really does misrepresent his legacy. Any time we interpret the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we need to do so through the framework of what he argued were the three biggest evils: racism, poverty, and war. So, any interpretation of King that doesn’t live up to that framework, really falls short. I always find it interesting that there are many American icons and if we think about just people on the National Mall—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson—it’s very rare that people try to dwindle down those legacies to one sentence. So, I always find it interesting and I always push back when people try to define King by one sentence when they don’t seem in a hurry to do that for other iconic Americans. I always think there is either just a lack of knowledge, or there is something that is a willful, deliberate misuse of Martin Luther King Jr. when people try to narrow his scope down to colorblindness.
Q: How are you seeing his influence show up in current movements for liberation and justice that we see today, whether that be for reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, protesting war, etc.?
Martin: I think I see his legacy with people connecting the role of economics and reproductive rights, I see his legacy there. When we are recognizing that women of color are experiencing maternal mortality rates that are significantly higher than other groups, and how we are connecting that to poverty and racism, and how that is shaping how we think about solutions to this, whether it is making sure that women here, in California and Oakland, for example, have access to midwives and doulas. Or, Stanford Medicine, for example, bringing together for the first time an entire university discussion around the Martin Luther King holiday on health equity. Not just for the medical school, which is very important, but also colleagues from across the university. I see his legacy is alive and well when I see things of this nature occurring, just locally, here in California, but also across the country in various aspects.
Q: How would you like to see people engaging with his work and his words today?
Carter: I would like people to actually read what he wrote, rather than looking at tweets, rather than looking at people’s interpretation of what he wrote. I would like people to actually read what he wrote because there’s a part of me that can point out certain speeches where I think you can see shifts in his thinking. Like, the speech he makes at the end of the march from Selma [Ala.], like “Beyond Vietnam,” like “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” I think all of these speeches are critical because I think they all mark shifts in his thinking tactically, and growth and evolution. He was young when he died; he wasn’t even 40. He was so young and just like all of us at that age, he was constantly trying to figure out what to do better. That’s why I keep coming back to the term “beloved community” because I feel like if we recognize that what he was trying to create and what he was trying to build, that gives us an idea of what his aim was. If we say, ‘OK, this was his goal. Now, how is he trying to get us there? What was his method for trying to get us there? What was he talking about? What were the points he was making? Where did he miss?’ because he could have done much better when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, particularly gender. He’s a man of his time in the ‘60s. Most men in the ‘60s could have been better. Most men in the 2020s could do better, let’s just be honest. Patriarchy is still alive and he doesn’t talk nearly enough about the ways in which patriarchy has shaped the Civil Rights Movement and how it shapes contemporary society. That’s the opportunity for us to add to the legacy. You don’t notice those things and say, ‘Well, this is why I should dismiss all of what he said.’ You notice those things and say, ‘Oh, he didn’t notice this. Now, if I add this to this, it further expands the opportunity for us to create communities of transformation.’
Martin: I would like to see people read King in context. So, not just one phrase in the “I Have a Dream” speech, but read the entire speech. Read the entire “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on King’s birthday. Read his speech against the Vietnam War, or listen to the speech that he gave here at Stanford University in 1967 called “The Other America.” I would love to see people read King in his entirety, to have a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday and allow that to shape how they celebrate and honor him, as opposed to doing so choosing one sentence. As we have a conversation with him on his birthday, we should also keep in mind the struggle that Coretta and others waged to try to get this to be a national holiday. We have to that there are plenty of people who were opposed to this. Even the president of the United States was opposed to it at one point in time, Ronald Reagan, and countless other elected officials.
